


Recovery

by Sohotthateveryonedied



Category: Batman (Comics), Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: Gen, I wrote this like three years ago okay, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Non-Consensual Touching, Tim needs a hug, but it's not graphic at all, idk what this is, or really even mentioned aside from metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-02 01:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17878481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sohotthateveryonedied/pseuds/Sohotthateveryonedied
Summary: Years ago I wrote a whole fic which was an AU of the Red Robin series in which Cass hadn't arrived in time to save Tim from being raped by that evil meta lady. I discovered the fic in an old word doc, so I decided to post a piece I salvaged from it here because why not. This is mostly just a whole lot of introspection and Damian being a good brother for once.





	Recovery

**Author's Note:**

> Again, I wrote this like three years ago and I was abysmal at writing back then, so uhhhh please excuse everything thanks.

_Thud._

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. 

_Thud._

The five stages of grief, in that order. A precarious and painstaking path from tragedy to peace, each step but a pit stop to the end goal.  

_Thud._

Not to brag, but Tim knew its stages by heart. After all, he’d had more than enough personal experience with grief in the past few years to last himself two lifetimes. Recovery was ingrained in his bones by now, as was suffering, for the two came hand-in-hand. 

_Thud._

Logically, there was no _immediate_ reason to be looking to the stages of grief for explanation for his particular…situation. He had nothing to grieve at the moment, right? No recent dead friends or family. No mission failures which ended in body bags. No tragedies.  

Well.

Not by its most prominent definition. No loss of life, but a loss of _something._ A loss of innocence, maybe. Definitely a loss of safety. _Something,_ otherwise the aching hole in his chest would have been filled already and he wouldn't feel like scratching at his skin until it bleeds out some of the hurt. 

So no, not a tragedy. But wasn’t it still? Wasn’t it enough to grieve the loss of an innocence he hadn’t even known he’d still possessed until it was already being ripped away from him?

_Thud._

Bats fluttered and chirped from the depths of the batcave, unseen yet making their presence clear in the echoes of their cries. A bead of sweat rolled down the back of Tim’s neck. Every swing at the bag made a jolt of pain throb in his shoulder, but fuck the very idea of stopping. No matter how deeply his knuckles ached and his teeth ground together so hard it felt like they might crack. Stopping meant being left alone with his thoughts, and that was a fate worse than the one he had come down to the cave to escape in the first place.

In the back－ _way_ back－of his mind, Tim felt the distant scrape of one of his knuckles splitting against the bag, but he shook it off just as quickly. One injury amid a plethora of others. One mark in the sea of blues and purples which already colored Tim’s body.

Tim should add it to his notes that, not caring? __Way__  easier than caring. Honestly, why didn’t people do this all the time? Lock your feelings behind steel doors, walk away, and _voila._ The world became just the tiniest bit more bearable. He should write a book. Go on Oprah. _A Rich Kid’s Guide to Trauma-Survival: The Benefits of Denial._ He’d make a fortune.

Tim had been at the punching bag for close to half an hour, he figured, but he wasn’t about to go and check for accuracy. To be honest, it was a shock no one had come down looking for him yet. Ever since coming home from Paris, it seemed as though Tim couldn’t have a moment to himself without someone breathing down his neck, hovering like at any second he would break apart.

And yeah, they were probably right, but that didn’t mean he had to be happy about it.  

_Thud._

_Thud._

_Thud._

All right, so maybe he _wasn’t_ going through the five stages of grief. After all, he had passed right over denial and went straight for depression. And now anger, he supposed. He was doing this all out of order.

Maybe the difference was that Tim wasn’t mourning a life this time, and that crucial detail threw everything off balance. He was mourning a loss, certainly, but it just wasn’t the same. The loss of innocence means changing up the rules of grieving, turning it all upside down and backwards. There was no manual for that.

Well, there was, but it had a different name.

(Rape recovery, Tim’s mind supplied.)

 _(Fuck off,_ he politely told his thoughts.)

_Thud._

_Thud._

_…_

Damn it.

Tim dropped his arms, sweat dripping down his face as he heaved for breath. His hair hung in front of his eyes, greasy and unwashed. The dark bruise on his jaw that _she_ had given him throbbed in time with his pulse. Tim listed forward until his forehead rested on the leather of the bag, closing his eyes.

How had they gotten to him so easily?

Tim Drake was trained by the best fighters in the world, by the _Batman himself,_  yet two mediocre metas had taken him out in seconds. Had he been watching it happen from a different angle, he would have laughed at himself. He would have made it into a vine and cackled at how easily they had taken him down. Like it was _child’s play._

He could still feel her on him. Five showers, and he could not scrape the sickening sensations off of his skin. He couldn’t erase _her._ Her skin, her nails, her breath on his face...

 _No._ Tim cut himself off.  _Don’t think about it._

But no matter how much he wanted to, he couldn't erase what she did to him. And wasn’t that unfair? Dick bragged all the time about his many past lovers and how much he loved being with them. Tim was physical with someone _one_ time, and all it did was make him want to throw up and cry and slam his head against a wall so hard it would erase the memories of her touching him. How _that_  was in any way fair, he didn’t－

Shocking like a lightning blast, fingers touched Tim’s shoulder.

Tim moved so fast he could barely even comprehend the movements himself, but one second he was facing the punching bag, and in the next Damian lay on the floor clutching his cheek.

_Oh._

Tim had just hit him.

Okay.

Tim took a few shaky breaths before slowly relaxing from his fighting stance. _(It’s okay. You’re okay. You don’t need another breakdown to land you in Leslie’s office again.)_ He watched with calculating eyes as Damian lifted himself from the stone floor. He wiped at the blood on his lip with the back of his sleeve.

They stared each other down, like they were daring the other to move first. For once Damian wasn’t wearing that trademark angry pug sneer, and it threw Tim for a loop with how boyish it made him look. He made no move towards Tim, and once minutes passed and it was apparent that Damian was not a threat, Tim lost interest in the game.

Damian wanted to come down and see Tim The Victim for himself? Fine. Tim didn’t have the energy to stop him.

Breaking eye contact with the ten-year-old, Tim turned away and began unwrapping his hands where red splotches had seeped through the white cloth surrounding his knuckles. Funny, he hadn’t noticed the sting until now. The longer Tim went, the more he was beginning to realize that being numb wasn’t so bad. In fact, anything that wasn’t crying in the shower or smashing everything in his room was an improvement at this point.

"You're bleeding."

Tim flinched, but he reigned it in. There was no need to act like a frightened rabbit around Damian. Probably. Tim turned back around, looking down at the kid blankly. “What?”

Cocking his head, Damian cleared his throat and repeated, "Your hands. They're bleeding."

Tim…didn't really know how to respond to that, so he didn’t. He continued unwrapping his knuckles, knowing Damian's cat-like eyes were still on him. He saw it coming when Damian reached out and put his hand over his arm, but the contact still made him shiver. He made no attempt to pull away when the fingers curled around his elbow and led him over to the medical cot in the corner of the cave.

It was such a shock to be touched by Damian without it leaving behind a bruise that Tim didn't resist as Damian sat him down and reached for the medical supplies on the cart.

He watched wordlessly as Damian disinfected the cuts on his knuckles, moving with slowed movements so as not to startle him. He supposed this was just life now. Babied day in, day out, so now even the _actual_ baby of the family was treating him the same way the rest of them did: like a broken toy.

Damian didn't look at Tim, nor did he falter in his work when he spoke. "So now you're angry?"

Tim didn't respond.

“Not that it matters to me either way. I just assumed you would be more of the self-pitying type, seeing as that seems to have been your method in the past.”

“Are you _trying_ to get your nose broken?” _Fuck_ his voice was hoarse. That was to be expected after having barely spoken since the attack, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be bitter about it.

Damian chewed the inside of his cheek. "Cain was very concerned, you should know. Almost as much as Grayson, if not more.” Well…that was interesting. Tim _had_ been wondering about where Cass had run off to, but Damian being the messenger was a surprise. After the initial rescue, he hadn’t seen a trace of her around the manor. He knew she felt guilty for not arriving in time before… _certain events_ could transpire, but Tim didn’t blame her. None of this was her fault.

“She left before you woke up,” Damian continued. “Personally, I doubt she could bear the sickening amount of emotion in the room. It was choking the life out of everyone."

Tim's lips quirked. "Even you?" He flinched when the antiseptic stung his cuts, but if Damian noticed, he didn't act like it. Trying not to baby him, Tim realized. He appreciated that.

Damian rolled his eyes. "I worried more about Grayson. You know him—he'd blame himself until his dying day for what happened. He cares too much about the people he loves, I guess." His eyes flickered back to Tim's face.

Neither spoke again, but they didn't need to.  

After that Damian finished bandaging Tim's hands and, for barely more than a second, he placed a hand on Tim's arm. A fleeting reassurance. Then he walked away, back upstairs to the manor, and Tim was alone again.

Wasn’t that how he always ended up, sooner or later? Right back to where he’d started, the only difference being a few new scars and a few new memories. Around and around he went.

Tim remembered reading a philosophy essay once on distractions, and how they were little more than an excuse for people to keep from focusing on their own inner turmoil. Without a bag to punch or a Damian to analyze, Tim was left alone with nothing but his thoughts, and he found himself sincerely missing the distractions.

Everyone had their own way of coping with this kind of thing. It wasn’t rare for Tim to catch Jason surrounded by empty bottles after a particular heavy minor-involved case, and Steph still jumped when you touched her too suddenly. Dick got uneasy whenever Catalina Flores was brought up in conversation, sometimes needing to leave the room and spend some time on the highest surface he could find.

They all had their coping strategies, and Tim had his.

Call it what you want, but going over the events in his head and finding what he did wrong was healthier than, say, picking up a drug addiction. Or, worse, needlepoint. Sure, the numb probably wasn’t the healthiest state of mind in the world, but sticking to the facts without trauma clouding his vision was better than nothing. And Tim _needed_ the facts, so numb/detective combo it was. 

Every time he closed his eyes, Tim saw the same sequence of events replaying again, and again, and again. And every time, he saw just how weak he had been.

Tim was trained by Batman and the greatest heroes on the planet. To have been captured so easily was a joke wrapped in a failure. Not even that, but he  _knew_ it was a trap. Tim _knew_  the League would lure him in and try something, so he had all of these contingencies set in place to keep that from happening. So many strategies and counteracts, yet he was woefully unprepared for the one he needed most.

But that was life. And life was cruel.

Still… Why _him?_ Sure, Ra's wanted an heir to achieve his own weird agenda, but there were plenty of better men out there. Why had he decided to subject _Tim_  to that? What had Tim done to deserve this?

Across the cave, the computer pinged.

And Tim remembered that wallowing and healing would have to wait for another time. Because Ra’s was still out there, and so was that woman, possibly carrying cargo that…

Well, Tim didn’t know exactly _what_  to do with that whole situation. But he did know one thing. He couldn’t afford to dwell on his trauma, taking time to “rest and recuperate” as Dick called it. Healing would have to wait, for there was no time for healing.

Not when there was still work to be done.

**Author's Note:**

> [Feel free to mosey on down to my Tumblr!](http://sohotthateveryonedied.tumblr.com/)


End file.
